“Pillion,” a gay B.D.S.M.-themed romantic comedy, begins, fittingly, with a song of submission. As the camera speeds down a road at night, we hear the lovesick lyrics of the Italian singer Betty Curtis’s 1962 hit “Chariot.” You might recall the song from “Goodfellas” (1990), playing over the mobster Henry Hill’s haphazard courtship of his future wife, Karen. Or you might flash back to “Sister Act” (1992), in which a choir of nuns converted the song into a sacred anthem of praise (“I will follow him / Follow him wherever he may go”). It’s hard to say which of these associations is nearer the mark. Does “Pillion,” like “Goodfellas,” chart the rocky relationship between a cocksure ruffian and a wide-eyed naïf? Or does the film, like “Sister Act,” illuminate the private rituals of a niche subculture, whose devotees perform unquestioning acts of service while dutifully garbed in black?
The novitiate, in this case, is Colin Smith (Harry Melling), a genial young man from the southeast London suburb of Bromley. Colin works in parking enforcement, sings in a barbershop quartet, and lives at home with his endlessly supportive parents, Peggy (Lesley Sharp) and Pete (Douglas Hodge), who just want him to settle down with a nice boyfriend. But Colin doesn’t settle down; he rides off. Not into the sunset—Bromley doesn’t seem to get many—but clinging tightly to Ray, a tall, dreamy blond motorcyclist. Ray is played by Alexander Skarsgård, who has never looked more like a Nordic god than he does here: immaculately chiselled, and as disdainful of small talk as he is impervious to chilly weather. The two men first lock eyes in a pub on a winter’s night, where Colin is instantly smitten. What Ray sees in Colin is initially more mysterious. They meet again on Christmas, wandering from an empty town square into a side alley; a package is unzipped, and gifts are furtively exchanged. The director and screenwriter Harry Lighton, making his feature-film début, isn’t coy about any of it, though he’s sly enough to plant some foreshadowing in a nearby coffee-shop window: “Taste the Christmas Comforts.”
The plot is basically “Fifty Shades of Ray.” The hunky biker is a sexual dominant in search of a submissive, and this first encounter is a test of Colin’s prowess, stamina, and commitment to his master’s pleasure. An outdoor blow job is one thing—and no small thing, from the sound of Colin’s happy choking noises—but will he also, say, lick Ray’s boots on command and like it? (He will.) And how will he respond when, a few days later, Ray brings him to a sparsely furnished duplex, where Colin is expected to cook dinner and keep off the furniture—even to the point of sleeping on a rug, at the foot of Ray’s bed? Colin goes along with it, and the next day’s activities are his reward: a hot and heavy wrestling match, full of crotch-squeezing, ass-baring calisthenics, plus a consummation that produces more pain than pleasure. After the fun and games, Ray is all business once more. “Buy yourself a butt plug,” he says. “You’re too tight.” Colin replies, “Yeah! Yeah, yeah, um . . . lovely. That sounds like a plan.”
The beauty of Melling’s performance lies in the exquisite phrasing and timing of that “um . . . lovely,” which blends excitement, awkwardness, confusion, and curiosity in exquisitely calibrated proportions. Melling is something of a rarity among movie actors, a distinctive-looking chameleon. Those of us who first encountered him onscreen as Harry Potter’s oafish, spoiled cousin, Dudley Dursley, may not have even recognized him in his later, better roles, several of which—a sleuthing Edgar Allan Poe, in “The Pale Blue Eye” (2022); an evil pharmaceuticals C.E.O., in “The Old Guard” (2020)—played on his air of gnomish cunning, his gimlet-eyed stare. “Pillion” represents another sharp left turn for the actor. To point out that Colin isn’t a conventional romantic lead is also to note, redundantly, that this movie isn’t a conventional romance.
Is it a romance at all? The two parties would disagree. “That’s not what this is,” Ray declares, with some exasperation but also a flicker of tenderness, after Colin tells him, “I love you.” Their bond is founded on a narrow principle of sexual gratification and governed by a strict imbalance of power: firm directives from Ray, effusive accommodations from Colin. Before long, Colin has buzzed his hair and fallen in with Ray’s biker gang, many of whose members are paired off in sub-dom dyads of their own. The group dynamics carry richly suggestive undercurrents of jealousy and camaraderie, though Lighton, for all the quasi-anthropological curiosity and matter-of-fact sexual candor of his vision, doesn’t flesh this out in great depth. (There is, however, a funny-melancholy scene in which Colin compares notes with another submissive, played by Jake Shears.) Lighton uses these dynamics, instead, to sow a seed of individual rebellion. Sooner or later, we sense, Colin will consider the terms of his agreement with Ray and decide that, after months of unerring obedience, some personal transgression of his own is in order.
No such revolt occurs in Adam Mars-Jones’s novel “Box Hill,” from which “Pillion” was adapted. The book, which bears the subtitle “A Story of Low Self-Esteem” and is set during the nineteen-seventies, is a sliver of a tale—slender yet devastatingly sharp. When we first meet Mars-Jones’s Colin, he’s a sexually inexperienced eighteen-year-old, who stumbles across Ray on Box Hill, a gay cruising ground. Their relationship lasts several years, only to be ended by tragedy, though some would see the end as a mercy: the Ray we meet on the page is not just demanding and inconsiderate but abusive. “What had begun as a rough seduction ended as, well, rape,” the book’s Colin tells us after Ray penetrates him for the first time, sans preamble or lubricant. “I’d said he could do anything with me. I know that. But some things can’t be consented to.”
“Pillion” never directly broaches the question of consent—but, crucially, nothing that Colin experiences, whether physical discomfort or emotional neglect, can be construed as a violation. What the director has done, in effect, is Lighton the mood. He has updated the setting to a present-day moment that is less closeted and more kink-friendly, if dominant-submissive romances as different as “Babygirl” (2024) and “Fifty Shades of Grey” (2015) are any indication. (“Pillion” has also aged Colin well past his teen-age years; although the character’s age is never specified, Melling is thirty-six.) Much of the onscreen conflict involves Colin’s parents, who, unlike their literary counterparts, know that their son is gay and take an embarrassingly overactive role in nurturing his love life. But Lighton doesn’t treat them as sitcom-ish meddlers. Peggy, wonderfully played by Sharp, is terminally ill, and she’s fiercely determined to insure that Colin is well taken care of after she’s gone. That puts her at odds with Ray, whose investment in her son hinges on a brusque, performative disregard for Colin’s happiness.
Ray can be cruelly withholding. He reveals nothing about where he’s from or what he does for a living, and he reserves what affection he has for his dog and his motorcycle. But he isn’t abusive, and there’s little suggestion of menace or danger in Skarsgård’s performance. The actor has already shown us what that would look like: in the series “Big Little Lies,” he played a husband and father whose taste for kink masked a terrifying hunger for inflicting pain. Ray, by contrast, is a figure of intermittent but undeniable mirth—a citadel of physical perfection whose sublimity occasionally touches the ridiculous. It’s both amusing and clarifying to see him in moments of downtime, when he sits around the apartment wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and elegant little specs. Playing a slow, faltering rendition of “Gymnopédie No. 1” on a keyboard or burying his nose in a Karl Ove Knausgaard novel, he’s practically a caricature of latent male sophistication and sensitivity, momentarily freed from all that sweat and leather.
Skarsgård wrings so much effortless dom-com gold from Ray’s show of intransigence that it’s almost a shock to see the performance deepen; he makes the character’s emotional limitations remarkably expressive. It should perhaps come as no surprise to learn that Ray’s extreme need for control is rooted in insecurity, and that nothing threatens him more than the reality of his own feelings—the possibility that he might actually want more from Colin than just a physical release. “Pillion” does turn out to be a romance after all, or at least more of one than Ray can admit or allow. The movie’s ending deviates, significantly and generously, from Mars-Jones’s much bleaker conclusion: Colin’s heart may be broken, but something within him has undeniably strengthened. He hasn’t lost what Ray calls his “aptitude for devotion,” or his genius for submission. But, in all the ways that count, he is riding pillion no longer. ♦












